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Video games and apps track your behavior while using their apps.

Developers use this and other information about you to maximize profits.

Some games become easier, harder, or impossible depending on what choices they think you will make.

Many video games cheat. Even games that seem fair on the surface use clever tricks to manipulate you into spending more time and money than you otherwise would.

Researcher Ayo Omolewa decompiled a number of popular games and apps, including Block Blast, Subway Surfers, and Candy Crush, to see how they work. He discovered that many of these games twist and change to maximize the amount of money they think they can make from you. Like a living thing, these apps analyze how you play, how skilled you are, and how much pain you’re willing to put up with and then adjust themselves accordingly.

In January 2026, the game Block Blast by developer Hungry Studio was the most downloaded game in the world. About three hundred million people played it that month.

In Block Blast, players work to drag and drop randomly selected tiles into a grid. When one places a tile in a way that completes a row or column, the row or column is removed, like finishing a row in Tetris, making room for further tiles. The game ends when there is no room to place the remaining tiles.

It is designed to feel like a luck-based strategy game. Which of the three blocks should you place first and where? “If I put this first block into the top corner, it will clear that row, which should give me space to place the second one…”

However, because this is a free-to-play game, the developers need to find ways to make money. I wrote about how free-to-play games make money by manipulating players in more detail here.

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